Remarks on Computer Music Culture.(Critical Essay)

Years ago, in the founding days of ASCAP, Richard Rodgers, composer of countless wonderful showtunes, is reputed to have cast "serious" (ASCAP's term to indicate art as opposed to entertainment) composers in the collective role of the research-and-development department of the music industry. And it does seem to be true that in the industry of electronic music, the research-and-development department has influenced the popular music division in different ways. Many pop-culture groups have acknowledged a back-ground in the electronic music classics, many popular-music composers listen seriously to "high-art" electronic music, and many commercially successful ideas and technologies have grown out of the "serious" music world. Sampling is rooted in the tradition of musique concrete, for example, and frequency modulation as a sound-generating technique was a product of computer music research.

Lines of influence occasionally seem to point also in the other direction, from popular music to computer music. Some computer music composers have incorporated popular elements such as jazz standards and folk tunes in their music and, far more important, some composers have reinterpreted the dynamics of jazz improvisation into the framework of performance with interactive systems.

In whatever direction influence flows, however, it is not surprising that composers of one type of music might take ideas from other types of music. But at this particular moment in the history of computer music, the flow of ideas between high art and popular art seems to have a particular significance. Indeed, the protective parapet that has long kept high art and popular art mutually exclusive seems to be showing signs of vulnerability. It seems that we are about to enter a new cultural architecture that we cannot yet describe; yet we are aware that technology is changing the world and that it will also change the world of computer music. The first question is, "Where are we now?" The second is, "How is computer music likely to change?"

Computer music (which I would define here as the type of music made with computers by the sort of composers who read Computer Music Journal) and popular electronic music (i.e., dance, techno, house, etc.) currently exist within different cultures. They are aimed at fundamentally different publics, and their practitioners exhibit different motivations and methods for achieving success. Music is communication, and every composer communicates with an intended public, real or imaginary, that inhabits the same culture in which the composer lives. It is a composer's culture that determines the nature of that composer's music, the nature of the public that listens to it, the meaning of success, and the methods employed by the composer to achieve success.

What, then, characterizes the current culture of computer music? First, computer music is aimed at an elite group of listeners that constitutes a segment of aristocratic high-art music culture. The elite group of listeners is small in number--smaller than the elite group that appreciates Wagner, for example--because the technology and the artistic concepts that have grown out of computer music are so new that a larger elite group has not yet had the time to grow. Second, computer music is appreciated primarily in aesthetic and intellectual terms. In listening to computer music, an audience must be quiet and attentive. Third, computer music is consumed by its public in concert or concert-like situations, where the public listens without participating, thereby indicating its recognition that a performer (or a surrogate performer in the form of loudspeakers) has a higher level of expertise and virtuosity. Fourth, innovation--both artistic and technical--is highly valued. This does not mean, incidentally, that every computer music composition is innovative. Exceptional composers will produce exceptional work, but the normal practice of computer music, as in the normal practice of any art, is normal precisely because it is unexceptional, produces nondistinctive results, and is practiced by a majority of practitioners.

When the focus of particular compositions is on acoustic instruments or chamber music (as in Pierre Boulez' Repons, for example), computer music is sometimes performed within the mainstream culture of 20th-century art music and, consequently, addresses an audience larger than the specific public for computer music. In general, the insertion of computer music into other art cultures--for example by creating technology-in-art interactive installations, incorporating elements of jazz or folk music, using sound in the context of acoustic ecology, or using recorded sounds as geographic documents to identify and characterize places--also extends the public for computer music. But at this time in the history of the field, most of the computer-music public consists of practitioners, which means that the relationship between composer and public is more collegial than commercial; that the motivations of composers are oriented not towards commerce but towards a combination of self expression, artistic fulfillment, and collegial recognition; and that composers' methods for achieving success reflect an aristocratic disdain for commercial effort, even if they occasionally involve negotiations within the network of organizations that define the formal structure of the computer music community. From a historical point of view, the net result of these non-commercial dynamics is that composers of computer music do not seem to enjoy subjecting themselves to the pressures of the commercial world any more than ...